With the coronovirus spreading into remote territories across the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous leaders and rights officials are pleading with the government to adopt urgent measures to head off a catastrophe.
According to figures compiled by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the country’s principal indigenous federation, deaths from COVID-19 in indigenous communities have risen from 46 on May 1 to 262 on June 9. Together with numbers tallied by state health departments around the country, APIB’s statistics show that 9.1 percent of indigenous people who contract the disease are dying, nearly double the 5.2 percent rate among the general Brazilian population.
The growing number of cases and the government’s sluggish response have prompted allegations of incompetence and disarray in official efforts to protect vulnerable tribal populations from contagion. Indeed, government health-care workers, together with illegal mineral prospectors and other intruders, now figure among the principal vectors of infection into protected indigenous territories. A report released last week by the federal attorney general’s office accused a team of health workers of flagrant negligence and decried the likelihood that government nurses and technicians had spread the virus among the very indigenous populations they’re supposed to protect.
On June 4, the federal indigenous health service, known by the acronym SESAI, acknowledged that four of its workers tested positive for the virus while deployed to a Kanamari tribal village in Javari Valley Indigenous Territory in far-western Brazil. A SESAI communiqué sought to downplay the episode, saying that only one of the workers had developed COVID-19 symptoms and that all four had been removed to quarantine.
But the attorney general’s report, released on June 5, voiced concern that the infected workers may have spread the virus to several other villages. And it accused another team of flagrant disregard of the epidemiological risk for entering the northeastern side of the Javari reserve without observing recommended quarantine protocols, to tend to Korubo tribespeople deemed particularly vulnerable.
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